31–40 of 106 posts
"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them ." I'm afraid everybody says this about whatever is new. Nowadays people would say this about Guido, Matz, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Looks like it worked pretty well, and made a lot of people very wealthy. The same could be said of [Insert great company here]. The same could also be said of many criminal enterprises and a variety of industries that were abusive before regulation and reform. Conclusion: The ability to say this is of no particular worth in determining if an enterprise is or isn't evil. EDIT: Downvoters: see grey-area's granchild c…
Evil? This isn't a conversation about making moral judgements, why are you dragging moral constructs into it?
All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends in the field.
Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual terms, the conversation should not just be a simplistic comparison of money earned... that's not a measure of greatness.
Steve Jobs always said that part of his job was to keep the bozos out and this article explains exactly why.
Every single company I have worked at has been on or past the Bozo Threshold... The author notes that this phenomenon may be limited to technical companies, but I would like to argue that it is not limited to technical companies and may not even be limited to companies at all! This same sort of stupidity can be seen any organization that is around long enough.
A great product is not built by comittee, because committees care too much about FAIRNESS!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Evil? This isn't a conversation about making moral judgements, why are you dragging moral constructs into it?
From the article: All of the great companies I have worked for (Apollo and Sun in various incarnations) or heard about (DEC, PARC, Bell Labs and the like) started around a core of incredible people. These were people who are or were legends in the field. Since the article talks of success and greatness in moral or intellectual terms, the conversation should not just be a simplistic comparison of money earned... that'…
That's an excellent paraphrase of my evidently controversial comment. (And it's arguably better because it avoids use of the emotionally loaded word "evil.")
Steve Kleiman, another Sun alum, had some international 'no bozo' stickers. I still have one stuck to a filing cabinet. Its possible for someone who was once quite good to become more of a bozo, sometimes its an ill advised step outside their comfort zone, sometimes they get pushed there by well meaning management. Like many things, and perhaps related to the nostalgia effect, it is 'obvious' in hindsight when the bo…
Can you stop it by staying small? I don't mean a small business, I mean a small team.
One of the amazing things of being at a successful company is that each passing quarter increasing revenue brings a bigger pool to spend on doing things, and there are so many things you want to do. But you can't do everything yourself, and growing means hiring, and hiring means getting larger.
Perhaps if you chose to fork the company at that point, I always wondered what would have happened at Google if they chose to 'slice off' the part that built platforms into its own universe. There are fairly natural dicing and slicing points.
But at Sun there was a huge chasm between the 'systems' folks (aka the SunOS creators) and the 'windows' folks (aka the SunTools guys and gals) and the 'language' folks and of course Sun Labs. Competition between how many DE's came from Systems (old boys club) vs other groups, and such like. I do know that one of the contributors was that Sun had a financial year that went July 1st to June 30th. Budget meetings happened in February for the upcoming fiscal year. Inevitably people would panic in April or May that Sun wasn't going to 'make the year' (meet expectations of Management or the street) and there would be wide adjustments (like hiring freezes). What we noticed was that everytime managers would panic and hire anyone they had interviewed if they could 'fog a mirror' just before the freeze because they knew if they didn't they wouldn't be able to hire for another 4 - 6 months. There were some quality issues with those hires.
the Google process reminded me of the time, more than 20 years ago, when I interviewed at Microsoft. And we saw how well that worked Microsoft from 1992 onwards? I guess we did; 20x increase in adjusted share price; in OSes alone, the release of Windows 3.1 (IMO the breakthrough move to GUI on PC, away from DOS), NT 3.1 (the original seed that grew to NT 3.51, NT 4, Win2K and all current kernels), breakthrough succes…
Motivation is what drives people even dummies to excel. And that's sometimes a coin flip. You will see stars perform poorly because they don't enjoy the environment or the specific task they are given.
When there's no motivation even a "star" will just procrastinate and be unhappy until he either quits or conform. When conformed unmotivated people outnumber the motivated ones that's when you are doomed.
In my personal experience being a bozo or not has less to do with the technical/non-technical skill and more to do with motivation. Motivation is what drives people even dummies to excel. And that's sometimes a coin flip. You will see stars perform poorly because they don't enjoy the environment or the specific task they are given. When there's no motivation even a "star" will just procrastinate and be unhappy until…
Perhaps Facebook is going to hit a motivation black hole, as stock options will no longer matter and so employees won't care about what's good for the company. Instead, they will care about bonuses and resume-padding.
Google has had poor motivation for years (employees who don't really care about the success of the company), I think, but they have enough good products that it doesn't really matter.
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I wonder if the current environment where HR googles everyone leads people to not give post-mortem stories of failures. Even if a technical person would see the wisdom of your post, HR might use it to discard your resume.
I can't imagine an HR department sharp enough to find, read, and think about your blog posts, yet dull enough to bin your resume because one of them describes some day-to-day error you made.
"Others, like James Gosling, quietly change the world by building something (the core Java language and libraries) that make so much sense and are so elegant that you just smile when you use them ." I'm afraid everybody says this about whatever is new. Nowadays people would say this about Guido, Matz, etc.
Also, I'm not sure that of all of Gosling's achievements, I would point to Java-the-language (or the UTTERLY GODAWFUL initial libraries) as a particular exemplar of elegance. NeWS was much, much, much more interesting and forward-thinking, for one.